just a cool, cool breath
stirs about the heart
the ice night
pure
is
Light
lighter than day
Swelling
Swelling
Swelling
it breaks the sky
it breaks the soul
the Hope
lies
cries
sighs
dies
just a cool, cool breath
stirs about the heart
Arise
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Standardization of the Soul
Sometimes it's hard to be a teacher.
Oh, I love my kids. I love it when they talk to me about their lives, when they think, when they grapple with a skill or a concept and finally wrestle it into submission, even when they break my heart with the parts of themselves they let slip while I'm watching.
But being entrenched in a system that--as a general rule--cares about the brain and not the soul sometimes drains the life out of me. Sure, all schools are different, and not all teachers fall prey to the whims of a state education department whose solution to all educational ills oftentimes seems to be nothing more than numbers and data and graphs and figures, one more black mark on a sea of white. I try to be one of these renegades, I really do. But sometimes my inability to reach my own expectations for what great teaching looks like couples with my disillusionment at being a cog in a wheel, and I feel utterly helpless.
Right now I'm working on an end-of-the-semester culminating research project for my first Master's class at Binghamton University. My research is predicated on the belief that in order to learn, kids must be engaged. They must be motivated. They must be driven from the inside. In order to be motivated--particularly in the areas of reading and writing--kids need to see that literacy is about communication, about stepping into the madness, the ugly-beauty, that is humanity and becoming a thinking, living, acting part of it. As I read article after article about student motivation, I find myself pronouncing unspoken "Amen's" to much of it. The issue is that as I find myself taking a step back to look at my vocation and to name it Good, Beautiful even, I also catch a glimpse of myself and feel incapable of holding up my end of the bargain. I want to help my students see life writ large, but how? When a student walks through my classroom door and my mind is swirling with his IEP goals and how in the world I can help him pass the subjects he is falling so miserably behind in and when I feel like my 24-hour days need to swell to 48 before I can get everything done, when his mind is swirling with his Grandpa who works until 6 and his increasingly senile Grandma and his mother who--thank God--is no longer incarcerated, and the fact that he can hardly tell which way is up, whether the cloud ever has a silver lining, or why he's even in school... when this is life for both of us, tell me how can I be what I want to be to this boy? How can I help him see what life is in the 35 minutes we have together each day?
At times like this, the only thing I can think to do is love him. Simply love him and hope for the best. Love him as Christ loves him, and trust that somehow life will fill in its own outlines with each of his passing years and that I can--just by being there--help him have the courage to look at it and perhaps one day, if God sees fit, pronounce it worth the living.
Oh, I love my kids. I love it when they talk to me about their lives, when they think, when they grapple with a skill or a concept and finally wrestle it into submission, even when they break my heart with the parts of themselves they let slip while I'm watching.
But being entrenched in a system that--as a general rule--cares about the brain and not the soul sometimes drains the life out of me. Sure, all schools are different, and not all teachers fall prey to the whims of a state education department whose solution to all educational ills oftentimes seems to be nothing more than numbers and data and graphs and figures, one more black mark on a sea of white. I try to be one of these renegades, I really do. But sometimes my inability to reach my own expectations for what great teaching looks like couples with my disillusionment at being a cog in a wheel, and I feel utterly helpless.
Right now I'm working on an end-of-the-semester culminating research project for my first Master's class at Binghamton University. My research is predicated on the belief that in order to learn, kids must be engaged. They must be motivated. They must be driven from the inside. In order to be motivated--particularly in the areas of reading and writing--kids need to see that literacy is about communication, about stepping into the madness, the ugly-beauty, that is humanity and becoming a thinking, living, acting part of it. As I read article after article about student motivation, I find myself pronouncing unspoken "Amen's" to much of it. The issue is that as I find myself taking a step back to look at my vocation and to name it Good, Beautiful even, I also catch a glimpse of myself and feel incapable of holding up my end of the bargain. I want to help my students see life writ large, but how? When a student walks through my classroom door and my mind is swirling with his IEP goals and how in the world I can help him pass the subjects he is falling so miserably behind in and when I feel like my 24-hour days need to swell to 48 before I can get everything done, when his mind is swirling with his Grandpa who works until 6 and his increasingly senile Grandma and his mother who--thank God--is no longer incarcerated, and the fact that he can hardly tell which way is up, whether the cloud ever has a silver lining, or why he's even in school... when this is life for both of us, tell me how can I be what I want to be to this boy? How can I help him see what life is in the 35 minutes we have together each day?
At times like this, the only thing I can think to do is love him. Simply love him and hope for the best. Love him as Christ loves him, and trust that somehow life will fill in its own outlines with each of his passing years and that I can--just by being there--help him have the courage to look at it and perhaps one day, if God sees fit, pronounce it worth the living.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Incarnation
ache beneath bones
bruise beneath flesh
dove come down
dwells in wilderness
with salve for the blue
and balm for the black
bottled breath breathes
blessed hurt bleeds
goodness is fed to grasping lack
dust turned to body
hope turned to soul
naught turned to all
shard turned to whole
bruise beneath flesh
dove come down
dwells in wilderness
with salve for the blue
and balm for the black
bottled breath breathes
blessed hurt bleeds
goodness is fed to grasping lack
dust turned to body
hope turned to soul
naught turned to all
shard turned to whole
If The Thought of a New School Year Is Daunting
just ignore it for a while. Here's what to do instead:
1. Just so happen to have a nice teacher friend who is part of a kayak group and has an extra kayak she gladly loans out to friends.
2. Wait for a blue moon. Hey--you just missed this one, but your turn will come in three more years, never fear.
3. Meet up with all the kayak fanatics aforesaid teacher friend likes to hang out with at a place called Long Pond out in the middle of nowhere (where all the best places are). Eat lots of food. Enjoy the bonfire the jolly elderly man three seats down made. Be generally merry.
4. As the moon comes up, its orange glow slowly fading into silver, stare at it for a good long time through the steady stream of sparks floating up from the flames.
5. When it's as dark as it gets by moonlight, put your kayak in the water. Do it early so you have the water to yourself for a bit.
6. Paddle slowly, gliding down the moonpath toward who knows where.
7. Be quiet. Very, very quiet. Listen.
8. When the stillness is broken by the friendly murmurings of other kayakers who have finally caught up, join the babble in an undertone for a few minutes.
9. Paddle back, perhaps not quite so slowly now that most of the magic has been memorized and the quiet is not so thick as it once was.
10. Leave the water. Sit at the fire for a good 15 minutes longer. Don't talk much. Pack up and head out, bidding farewell to all of the new, strange, and wonderful people whose faces are still lit up by the fire. Drive home slowly. Clamber up the steps to your apartment. Sleep deep.
1. Just so happen to have a nice teacher friend who is part of a kayak group and has an extra kayak she gladly loans out to friends.
2. Wait for a blue moon. Hey--you just missed this one, but your turn will come in three more years, never fear.
3. Meet up with all the kayak fanatics aforesaid teacher friend likes to hang out with at a place called Long Pond out in the middle of nowhere (where all the best places are). Eat lots of food. Enjoy the bonfire the jolly elderly man three seats down made. Be generally merry.
4. As the moon comes up, its orange glow slowly fading into silver, stare at it for a good long time through the steady stream of sparks floating up from the flames.
5. When it's as dark as it gets by moonlight, put your kayak in the water. Do it early so you have the water to yourself for a bit.
6. Paddle slowly, gliding down the moonpath toward who knows where.
7. Be quiet. Very, very quiet. Listen.
8. When the stillness is broken by the friendly murmurings of other kayakers who have finally caught up, join the babble in an undertone for a few minutes.
9. Paddle back, perhaps not quite so slowly now that most of the magic has been memorized and the quiet is not so thick as it once was.
10. Leave the water. Sit at the fire for a good 15 minutes longer. Don't talk much. Pack up and head out, bidding farewell to all of the new, strange, and wonderful people whose faces are still lit up by the fire. Drive home slowly. Clamber up the steps to your apartment. Sleep deep.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
From an Unbaptized Girl
I sit in heavy air tonight. It hangs thick around my ears and in my hair and out the screen door where the lightning bugs are beginning to flicker for one more dance in the dark. The fan is doing its darndest to be an air conditioner, but it can't change its nature. It can only swirl the hot air around languidly from one room to the next before it makes its way back again to the kitchen table where I sit clacking keys.
I've been thinking an awful lot lately--about living alone, about the feeling of having finished my first year of teaching, about church. About writing another blog post after what feels like months of finishing one thing only to be caught up in the next. About what it takes to slow down and breathe in the middle of day-to-day craziness...slowing down to notice the smell of watermelon in the park or to pick up a bluejay feather, slowing down to give thanks. About what it means to be baptized after years of thinking and doubting and wondering and being won.
Thinking, too, about what it means to feel a peace that hangs as thick and heavy as the air around me. I don't always feel it, but only having felt it once one learns to know the taste. Even when faced with failure, with one's own state of brokenness, the memory of this peace sticks in the soul like honey and slowly fills up the cracks and sweetens shame with grace.
________________________________________________
I don't have a whole lot of space in my apartment, but I've tried to fill it with things that matter. Some of my dearest possessions (and I kid not...) have been my plants. When I first moved here last August, my best friend from high school and her other-best-friend-boyfriend-nice-boy-Kevin came to visit. We went to a plant and produce stand called Frog Pond (which I was disappointed to learn had neither frogs nor a pond) where we wandered the greenhouses admiring plants. Kevin, who is altogether too generous for his own good, slyly bought me pretty much all of the plants I took a liking to as a housewarming gift. They started out this fall small and spindly. They brought life to the apartment, though, and gave me something to take care of. I felt a kinship with them as they put roots down and grew accustomed to being somewhere outside the greenhouse. I walked into my apartment after school every afternoon to plants that were growing greener and friendlier and bigger by the day. When my African violet burst into bloom, I felt like a proud mother crooning over her first child.
_________________________________________________
I don't know what I'm going to say when I'm baptized this Sunday. Baptism is public, and it feels like I'll be dragging some of the deepest parts of myself out into full view for others to look at. What does one say at such a time? I'm not sure yet. What I am sure of, though, is that this is something I want despite the discomfort of public proclamation.
And oddly enough?
I think it has something to do with the African violet sitting by my window.
I've been thinking an awful lot lately--about living alone, about the feeling of having finished my first year of teaching, about church. About writing another blog post after what feels like months of finishing one thing only to be caught up in the next. About what it takes to slow down and breathe in the middle of day-to-day craziness...slowing down to notice the smell of watermelon in the park or to pick up a bluejay feather, slowing down to give thanks. About what it means to be baptized after years of thinking and doubting and wondering and being won.
Thinking, too, about what it means to feel a peace that hangs as thick and heavy as the air around me. I don't always feel it, but only having felt it once one learns to know the taste. Even when faced with failure, with one's own state of brokenness, the memory of this peace sticks in the soul like honey and slowly fills up the cracks and sweetens shame with grace.
________________________________________________
I don't have a whole lot of space in my apartment, but I've tried to fill it with things that matter. Some of my dearest possessions (and I kid not...) have been my plants. When I first moved here last August, my best friend from high school and her other-best-friend-boyfriend-nice-boy-Kevin came to visit. We went to a plant and produce stand called Frog Pond (which I was disappointed to learn had neither frogs nor a pond) where we wandered the greenhouses admiring plants. Kevin, who is altogether too generous for his own good, slyly bought me pretty much all of the plants I took a liking to as a housewarming gift. They started out this fall small and spindly. They brought life to the apartment, though, and gave me something to take care of. I felt a kinship with them as they put roots down and grew accustomed to being somewhere outside the greenhouse. I walked into my apartment after school every afternoon to plants that were growing greener and friendlier and bigger by the day. When my African violet burst into bloom, I felt like a proud mother crooning over her first child.
_________________________________________________
I don't know what I'm going to say when I'm baptized this Sunday. Baptism is public, and it feels like I'll be dragging some of the deepest parts of myself out into full view for others to look at. What does one say at such a time? I'm not sure yet. What I am sure of, though, is that this is something I want despite the discomfort of public proclamation.
And oddly enough?
I think it has something to do with the African violet sitting by my window.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
In Honor of Nothing
I truly have nothing to say tonight. It seems that there are so many profound and mundane and in-between things in the world that one should always have something to say. But tonight the well is dry.
So much has been said already, after all. Who am I to clutter the world with a meaningless blog post like this one when some people really do have things to say? Let them speak. Let them ink their words onto the blogosphere.
But I, being puny and human and alone in a small apartment at 9:45 pm, still feel the urge to make my voice heard. The keys click and clack under my fingertips, and I suddenly feel neither puny nor human--well, yes, I guess I still feel human--nor alone any longer. For I, Deborah Anne, have voiced my Nothing into the great expanse.
This one's for you.
So much has been said already, after all. Who am I to clutter the world with a meaningless blog post like this one when some people really do have things to say? Let them speak. Let them ink their words onto the blogosphere.
But I, being puny and human and alone in a small apartment at 9:45 pm, still feel the urge to make my voice heard. The keys click and clack under my fingertips, and I suddenly feel neither puny nor human--well, yes, I guess I still feel human--nor alone any longer. For I, Deborah Anne, have voiced my Nothing into the great expanse.
This one's for you.
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